October 15, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, why do we participate in these strange celebrations every Halloween? Lesley Bannatyne is the author of Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History, and Lisa Morton is the author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
Today we're going to bring to light the Halloween stories
that have been hiding in the dark, answering the question
why do we participate in these strange celebrations every Halloween season.
(00:31):
Here to tell the story are two of the foremost
authorities on Halloween, Leslie Vanattine and Lisa Morton. Leslie is
the author of Halloween, an American Holiday and American History.
Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat, A History
of Halloween. Here's Leslie and Lisa with the story of Halloween.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
I'm Leslie Vannatyne. I've been looking at, researching and writing
about Halloween for over thirty five years now and it's
still interesting to me. And so I guess if you
wanted to start the story of Halloween, you could go
back to Sowen, which was a time of year in
(01:14):
northwestern Europe. That's Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany. It means summer's end.
Sowen means summer's end and it was time of year
around November first where tribes would move their livestock back
to winter quarters to keep them safe, and they would
gather together. It was kind of a little bit like
(01:35):
our Thanksgiving in that people would come together, they'd play games, eat, drink,
tell stories, and because it was a big community kind
of day or festival, the dead were naturally part of it.
And there was a belief that the other world was
especially present at this time, at summer's end, because we
(01:58):
were going into the dark and dangerous season, and it's
always good to consult with the ancestors when you're going
into something dangerous.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Salin, which by the way, is spelled sam hai n.
It looks like it should be pronounced sam Hayne, but
it's not. It is Salin, was a day that they
did indeed celebrate on October thirty first. Their festivals started
when the sun went down, so it began actually on
the evening of October thirty first, and then spilled over
(02:33):
into November first, and it was a night when they
believed that the veil between the worlds was at its
thinnest and that things could cross over and cause real mischief.
On that night, they believed in really malicious fairies called
the She and a lot of people have heard of
the banshee that actually translates to a female fairy, and
(02:55):
these fairies were really nasty little things. We're not talking
Disney tinkerbe all kind of things here. We're talking things
that would come over and burn down their palaces. There's
a famous story about that. There's another story about a
hero who is sent out by the King on sw
and Eve to place a cord around the foot of
(03:15):
a corpse, which is something that no one else has
been able to do. And when he does this, the
corpse comes to life and he lets it down, and
it takes it out to get a drink. It's thirsty,
and it spits on people and kills them. This is
an absolutely terrifying story, so it definitely had a very
macabre element. Swan did and then when the Christians missionaries
(03:40):
came in and they were anxious to convert these celts
to their faith, and they had a doctrine of not
just trying to stamp out existing celebrations, but of trying
to co opt them. And Pope Gregory the Third was
one of the big people who was behind this doctrine
of trying to co op these existing celebrations and so
(04:03):
they sent the missionaries in and they moved the date
of their Saints celebration. Originally, All Saints Day was celebrated
on May thirteenth, which was an old Roman holiday associated
with the dead, but they moved it to November first,
and so it would begin on the eve before, and
(04:24):
they did that to try and co opt Soalen and
it was not entirely successful. Interestingly enough, so a few
centuries after that they added a second holiday, which is
All Souls Day, and that actually happens on November two.
All Souls Day also served the purpose of letting everyone
celebrate their deceased loved ones, not just Saints, so it
(04:47):
had kind of a dual role there, and that became
much more successful now they were starting to convert the
Celts and so forth.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And All Saints State doesn't have a lot to do
with Halloween, but it did give Halloween aime. Name for
All Saints Day is known in some countries as All Hallows.
All Hallows means Saint or holy one, and so All
Hallows Eve would be the eve before All Hallows Day
all Saints Day. So Halloween comes from All Saints Day
(05:15):
the name Halloween, but Halloween gets it's juju from All
Souls Day, and so here you have the same kind
of thing going on as what's going on with Swen
is that the Church recognizes there's a time every year
to honor the dead. There's several times, but in the
fall as winter's approaching. All Souls Day was instituted in
about the eleventh century, and people have been visiting graveyards
(05:40):
and remembering their loved ones and thinking of the dead
for the last thousand years on that day and still do.
Of course in many Catholic countries there's still visitations to
the graveyards. It's an important holiday and it's important time
to remember the dead. So that comes along from Salen
through the Church, becomes very popular throughout medieval times, so
(06:05):
doesn't have anything to do with modern Halloween. Really they're separate.
But what does is the eve of All Saints Day,
the night going into this holy set of holidays, which
is Halloween. And like Marti Gras is to Lent, Halloween
is to these really important church days. It's the time
(06:27):
to have a party. It's secular time. It's fun time.
It's gathered together, play games, eat, drink, tell stories before
you go into the serious church holidays, we're gonna spend
a lot of time indoors and praying.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
And you've been listening to Leslie Benetteyne and Lisa Morton
tell the story of Halloween. I love what they just described.
Marti Gras is to lend as Halloween is to All
Saints Day and all Souls Day. When we come back,
more of the story of Halloween, how it came to
be what it is today here on our American Stories. Folks,
(07:31):
if you love the great American stories we tell and
love America like we do, we're asking you to become
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Go to our Americanstories dot com now and go to
(07:52):
the donate button and help us keep the great American
stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And we
continue with our American Stories and the story of how
(08:12):
Halloween came to be. Our two in house experts, Leslie
Bennettyne and Lisa Morton continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So when the church theorized about purgatory, this was a
place where souls went to wait until they could either
send to heaven or not. And when purgatory became an
important concept in the church, it was critical for people
(08:43):
to pray for their dead because if the harder they prayed,
the more they prayed, the easier their loved ones would
have to go into heaven. So the church actually created
this interactive relationship between the living and the dead. It
became part of Halloween this day, so if you pray
for the dead, you can help them to heaven. There
(09:05):
was a custom of begging house to house that was
associated with All Souls Day, and in several of these processions,
people could ask house to house for soul cakes. Give me,
give me a piece of bread or a soul cake,
and I'll say a prayer for the one you have lost.
So there was this nice exchange, and it's also set
(09:28):
a kind of precedent for house to house begging that
we still see at Halloween today, only it's candies and
there's no prayers for the dearly departed.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Now we have this thing coming in called All Hollows Eve,
which eventually gets abbreviated into the name we know Halloween,
and it was for the first few centuries and we're
talking now around probably the thirteen fourteen, fifteen hundreds. It
was a day that was somewhat similar to Salen, that
was celebrated with feasting, with gatherings, with playing game. We know,
(10:00):
for example, that bobbing for apples was around really early on,
but we are also getting them keeping that more macab element.
And one of the classic descriptions we have of an
early Halloween celebration is a Robert Burns poem from seventeen
eighty five called Halloween, and it talks about telling ghost
(10:22):
stories and playing these fortune telling games. At the time,
young people were obsessed with learning who they would end
up marrying, so they would play these fortune telling games
on Halloween night that would tell them who they might
end up marrying. And the games sometimes were very macab.
They might consist of calling on the devil. Some of
(10:42):
them were more innocent. For example, they would set nuts
out in front of a fireplace and they would name
each of the nuts for a specific person, and depending
on which nut cracked first, would indicate who they would
end up marrying. And in fact, that was so popular
that in some parts of the British Isles it was
called Nutcrack Night rather than even Halloween or All Saints
(11:03):
Eve or All Hallows Eve.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Another thing that was interesting about All Souls in All
Saints was that it was Catholic, and so in Ireland,
no problem whatsoever. But when Protestantism came in Martin Luther
and in Scotland became Protestant, and in Protestantism, ghosts are
(11:29):
slights of Satan, and so in Scotland you have this
incredibly rich and scary superstition about witches, because if there
were beings out that you couldn't see at this time
of year, they were not good in Scotland. In Calvinism,
these were agents of the devil, and the agents of
(11:49):
the devil that they fixed on were witches. And so
in Calvinist Scotland you've got this incredible witchcraft.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Lord well was that stuck.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
With Halloween to today? You know, that's where we first
got the Halloween Witch. The first Halloween icon maybe is
the ghost that you know, you're the spirit of someone
in your past who's passed on. But the second is
definitely the witch, and that came from Calvinist Scotland. So
with this iconography of witchcraft in its association with Halloween,
(12:24):
it's a nighttime thing, right. Halloween is a nighttime holiday.
You have to celebrate it mostly after dark, and witchcraft
is kind of something that happens in the dark, and
so nocturnal animals and creatures get associated with it just
over time and throughout mythology and folklore. So the images
(12:46):
of the witch came down through the centuries and got
more and more associated with cats and bats and moons
and all sorts of things that you would find in
the dark. That had a lot to do with just
how people portrayed Halloween flater in magazines when there were
drawings of it, and even later than that, in the
(13:07):
nineteen thirties in America won we have this explosion of
postcards and they needed graphic images, and all of a
sudden we grew up with the witch, the moon, the cat,
the that being part of Halloween.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And there is a final thing that cements the place
of witches in Halloween, which is much more recent, which
a lot of people may not realize how important this was.
There is a nineteen thirty nine film that comes out
called The Wizard of Oz and Margaret Hamilton's portrayal of
the wicked Witch in that with the green skin and
the huge black pointed hat and the black cloak and
(13:42):
so forth, really created our image of the witch as
we have it now. Prior to that, if you look
at vintage drawings of Halloween witches, they're often in red,
and they are usually depicted as being elderly but not
quite so cronish looking, although there were also sexy young
(14:03):
witches that were popular in the nineteen tens and twenties.
And of course the black Cat and the Cauldron are
also Halloween icons that come along with the witch. And
there's also a story by Edgar Allan Poe which cements
the reputation of the black Cat in regards to Halloween.
(14:25):
So at this point people might be wondering, well, how
does that end up becoming associated with things like the pumpkin,
which is kind of now our king of Halloween icons.
The pumpkin also comes to us from Ireland. Obviously they
don't have pumpkins in Ireland. Pumpkins are a New World
fruit and they had turnips though, and the Irish loved
(14:47):
to play pranks on Halloween, and when the Irish came
to America in the mid nineteenth century. In the eighteen forties,
because of famine, they brought a lot of these halloween
things with them, and the things they brought with them
was pranks. And one of their favorite pranks was to
take these turnips that grew in Ireland and carve a
(15:08):
sort of spooky looking face into them, and then put
a candle inside of that, and they would set that
out somewhere at night on Halloween night, where an unwaried
traveler or an unwary homeowner might stumble across this thing.
And you can imagine that if you're out late at
night and you suddenly turn a corner and you see
this glowing face, it would give you a bit of
(15:29):
a start. So they brought that with them to the
New World, and of course when they arrived here and
found these gorgeous, huge pumpkins, they were the perfect thing
to replace the turnips. But there's another thing that's associated
with the pumpkin that's really interesting, which is a legendary
trickster story where we get the name Jack o Lantern
(15:52):
comes from a famous legend of Jack the Trickster, and
Jack was a blacksmith who had three times tricked the
devil out of coming to claim his soul. But when
Jack finally dies, it turns out that neither Heaven nor
Hell wants anything to do with Jack. The devil agrees
only to throw him a burning hell ember to light
(16:14):
his way. And so Jack places this ember in this
carved gourd and uses it to light his way as
he eternally roams the earth. And that's how the name
Jack o Lantern came about, being associated with these carved pumpkins.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
In colonial America, Halloween was not a thing. There were Halloween,
the secular holiday, the Eve of all Hallows, was not
anything that anyone would celebrate. We were Puritans, you know,
we didn't even celebrate Christmas. This is not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And We've been listening to Leslie Bannettine and Lisa Morton
tell the story of Halloween, and I'm learning things that
I never knew about the Jack O'Lantern, for instance, or
the pumpkin. Great storytelling more of it to come, Leslie
Vanattine and Lisa Morton. Leslie is the author of Halloween,
an American Holiday and American History. Lisa is the author
(17:09):
of Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween, the story
of Halloween, how it came to be here in America,
such a big, big celebration day. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue here with our American stories and the
story of Halloween as brought to us by Leslie Bennettyne
and Lisa Morton, both prolific authors and experts on the
subject of all things Halloween. It's history right up to
modern day times. Here's Leslie and Lisa to continue with
the story.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
As the colonies developed, and this the new nation developed,
different colonies had different religious bents, and so in Catholic
colonies like Maryland, for example, yes there was All Saints
and All Souls state, but that's not Halloween. It's all
Hallows in name. But it's a church holiday, and it
had nothing to do with witches and ghosts and pumpkins
and anything that we would recognize. Those are church holidays.
(18:52):
The first was the Civil War, when so many people
had lost so many family members, and in that war
more than many many many other subsequent wars combined, everybody
had lost somebody and they didn't know if they were
dead or alive. There was so many missing people in
(19:14):
the Civil War, so you know, where's my husband, where's
my brother? Is he coming home?
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Where's my son?
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I can't find my son. And there was a huge
interest in the dead, in spiritualism.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
In ghosts.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
All of this became really important to post Civil War
Victorians who were bereft. So keep that in mind. We
loved ghosts at that time, and then put the nail
in the coffin. Was printing became cheap at that time.
In the late eighteen hundreds, there were a million magazines.
(19:52):
I exaggerate slightly. There were a lot of ladies, magazines
and newspapers, all of looking for content. And when they
discovered this ghostly Scottish they thought holiday that had to
do with the spirit world and looking into the future.
(20:13):
They just loved it. And so it was Victorian hostesses
who started throwing the first Halloween themed parties. So let's
get together and play games when we look into the future.
Let's decorate by bringing the outdoors inside. Let's get cornstocks
and pumpkins and all sorts of rural things, things from
(20:35):
the country that we love, and let's throw a party
on this weird night that we've heard about, this Halloween.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
So these are all the things that we have coming
over with the holiday. And you might think that maybe
trick or treat, which is I think our greatest American
addition to the holiday, stems directly from all of those things,
but it actually does not. It comes from pranking. And
(21:04):
it's a really strange history of how that comes about.
The Irish who loved to play their pranks that caught
on a lot in the nineteenth century, and American kids
loved playing pranks, of course, and this spread throughout the
entire country, and at first it was quite innocent. The
(21:25):
prank playing in America was things like the kids would
go out to a farm and they would maybe overturn
an out house or tip over a cow, or one
of their more elaborate pranks that they loved was to
disassemble a gate and move it and reassemble at someplace
like either the main street of the town or the
(21:46):
top of a barn. And in fact, this one prank
was so popular that Halloween was known as gate Night
in many areas, and.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So tricks were really the first part of Halloween that
we had in this country. And it was like every
kid's right to go out under cover of darkness and
take the gates off of their neighbors pigpens or pile
stones up in the middle of the street, or put
molasses on the church bench, or remove the church steps,
(22:16):
or hang a rocking chair in the tree, or any
number of pranks, and everyone would say, okay, it's Halloween.
It's okay, it's just kids.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
So it was all good fun at first. But then
by the twentieth century, as America is becoming much more
urbanized and more populated, these pranks move into the cities,
and when they move into the cities, they become much
less nice. Now they are about destroying things, about shattering
glass bulbs and windows. They are about setting fires, tripping pedestrians,
(22:56):
and by the thirties they are causing millions of dollars
of damage. And this is also during the Great Depression,
when a lot of these cities don't even have the
money to pay for all of the damage that's resulting
from this vandalism, and a lot of cities at this
point considered dropping Halloween or trying to ban it. But
(23:16):
fortunately there were a few places where cooler heads prevailed
and said, you know, maybe we can buy these kids
off instead of trying to ban this holiday, because that
could backfire on us, which it would have.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
And so every civic organization you can think of, PTA's,
Kawana's Moose, Junior Chamber of Commerce, churches, hospitals, dance clubs,
anything through started to throw Halloween parties for kids to
keep them inside where they could be seen. So Halloween
(23:53):
was always an outside in the dark event, and this
was an effort to move Halloween indoors, actually to move
it more towards younger children, to help younger children celebrate it.
Let's just take a little bit of the danger out
of this holiday, keep the kids where we can see them,
and tame it down just a little bit. And there
(24:14):
was an enormous coast to coast effort to throw Halloween
parties for kids by civic work. It's actually very generous,
you know, to do this, and to some extent it worked.
I mean, there were creative ideas. Police would drive around
in their cruisers in one city and hand out candy
(24:34):
preemptively to children so that they wouldn't come throwing cabbages
at doors or ringing doorbells and just trying to tame
the whole situation down. Or radio programs sometimes would have
call in shows where if you were home at say
seven thirty or eight o'clock, and you called in, you
could win a prize that keeps the child or the
(24:55):
teenager inside where you can see them.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
And they got together, and they a actually put out
little pamphlets in many of the cities that would tell
homeowners how to do this. So these little pamphlets would
suggest that the homeowners get together. Again. We're still during
the Great Depression, a lot of homeowners don't have money
to spare for parties and so forth. But if enough
of the houses got together in one street, they could
(25:20):
put something together for the kids. And these were called
house to house parties. And the way they would work
was the first house might give the kids a very
simple costume, probably just a sheet with two holes cut
in it. The kids would get to be ghost. The
next house would give the kids maybe a little spooky entertainment,
like they'd have the basement the lights shut off, a
(25:43):
little thing where the kids would have to go through
the basement, somebody might jump out and frighten them. This
becomes kind of the very earliest version of our modern
haunted attraction. And then the next house would give the
kids a little treat. Well, this was very popular. It
caught off very quickly. Everyone started holding parties for kids.
(26:04):
By nineteen thirty six we get the first mentioned in
a national American magazine of the phrase trick or treat,
which actually probably came down from Canada. The first recorded
uses we have of it are in Canada, although they
are not always in relation to kids in an actual costume.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
And you've been listening to Lisa Morton, author of Trick
or Treat, A History of Halloween, and Leslie Pratt Benattine,
author of Halloween and American Holiday and American History. By
the way, both of those books are available on Amazon
dot com. What are the usual suspects? By all means,
pick them up, read them great holiday material, great holiday
reading material. When we come back more of Leslie and
(26:47):
Lisa on the story of Halloween, m.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
And we continue with our American stories and the story
of Halloween and how it came to be. Leslie Bennetteyne
and Lisa Morton continue with the storytelling.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Now here's the thing, like, how did the trick or
treat happen? From all of these parties, from all these
mischief and tricks, and the town fathers and mothers trying
to tamp it down. That never entirely worked. What really
worked was involving each individual homeowner. So there were kids
(28:08):
out on the street accosting people for money or food
or treats, and accosting like hitting them on the back
with a sock full of flour or you know, and
asking them for something. So the thinking was, okay, so
if this, if that's what they want, If they're out
accusting people, banging on doors demanding things, and we're in
(28:31):
our houses saying go away, go away, why not have
something for them. Be you ready, have candy, have treats,
bakes and brownies, make cookies, popcorn balls. When they come
to your door, open it up, offer it. And that,
in fact was what worked. But people had to be
(28:52):
talked to do this.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
So the whole ritual kids in a costume, going to
a house saying trick or treat, being rewarded with a
little sweet. That is in place by about nineteen thirty six,
and it takes a few more years for it to
become really widespread across the country, and then it gets
put on hold during World War Two because sugar was
rationed and it was very hard to get into the
(29:17):
spirit of Halloween and get treats and so forth. But
then at the end of the war it comes back
with a vengeance because we now also have something called
television that's coming in. And trick or treat was spread
in part through early sitcoms. You can, for example, go
look at a I think it's nineteen fifty episode of
(29:40):
the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and you can see
a really early, kind of strange looking form of trick
or treat. The kids are standing at the door in
the afternoon and their costumes are not quite finished. But
it definitely paved the way for this whole institution of
trick or treat. Also, the ca companies come in now
(30:01):
because mom sitting at home does not want to bake
all day. She doesn't want to spend her day making
popcorn balls or candied apples or donuts to give to
these kids. It's much easier to just go out and
buy a bag of pre made candies and to pass
those out.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
There was a cartoon that was incredibly popular culture contreat.
It was a Donald Duck cartoon where Hueye doing Louis Are,
you know, sending off small explosives and it kind of
taught what you're supposed to do with kids who are
pulling tricks is to offer them candy. This is what
we do. And that cartoon was shown in movie theaters
(30:42):
for for a long time and thousands and thousand thousands
of people saw it, and so we kind of started
to get the pictures. This is how you take care
of tricks, and it's fun for kids, and it's actually
fun for the homeowner who doesn't have to like, put
up with his doorbell ringing, you know, every thirty seconds
on Halloween night, or worry that if he doesn't open
(31:04):
the door to kids that they'll remove his fence posts
or steps by morning. La la la lay wound lawn.
(31:42):
So by nineteen sixty four, it was almost Unamerican not
to turn your porch light on it.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Folloween, so we now have this combination of these sitcoms
and these candy companies and costume companies also come in
and make it much easier. Again, Mom doesn't have to
sew noash. You can just go out to the store
buy a costume. The kids can buy their favorite character.
Because now the costume companies are merchandising cartoon characters, historical characters,
(32:10):
things like that and trick or treat becomes a real
institution for about the next twenty years, and then a
couple of things happen to change trick or treating. In
the early sixties, there is a woman named Helen File
who gives out. She gets tired of older kids coming
to her house on trick or Treat and she gives
them aunt buttons, and she is doing this just because
(32:34):
she doesn't like these older kids trick or treating, but
it becomes sort of trendsmogrified into the story of the
anonymous psycho who is spiking apples with razor blades, and
then in the early seventies that gets added to again
with the story of Ronald O'Brien who is a young
(32:56):
boy who is poisoned by his own father who who
is in for an insurance scheme and puts arsenic in
his children's pixie sticks. And even though it was proven
pretty quickly that this was the father doing this, it
again becomes a notion that there are anonymous psychos out
there who are tampering with your kids treats on Halloween,
(33:19):
and it really knocks trigger treating back, even though a
lot of hospitals are now stepping up and saying things like, well,
X ray your kids candy on Halloween Night. It does
set the whole idea of Halloween Night being just for
kids back pretty severely, and that kind of gets a
(33:39):
final blow in nineteen seventy eight when one movie changes
a holiday, which is something that I don't know has
happened with any other holiday. John Carpenter releases Halloween, and
now we have, for the first time a look at
Halloween as something that is absolutely terrifying and very adult.
(34:02):
And it kind of cements that transformation of the holiday
from something that is celebrated mainly by kids to something
that is much more a sort of celebration of fear
for adults. And that continues throughout the seventies with counterculture
groups claiming the holiday, and also into the eighties when
(34:24):
beer companies come along and realize that there is a
lot of money to be made off of Halloween. The
Corps Company was looking for a holiday that they could
turn into their version of the Super Bowl, and their
first attempt at marketing beer to Halloween did not work.
It was something that a few people may remember a
(34:46):
silver Bullet campaign. But then in about nineteen eighty six,
they got smart enough to hire Elvira, and as soon
as they hired Elvira and put standies of her in
markets throughout the country, Halloween became a beer holiday. It
was huge, and it was one of the things again
that morphed this from being something for kids into something
(35:08):
much more adult oriented. Beer sales were huge after they
hired Elvira. She was the magic marketing tip there and
using her and her image and so forth allowed them
to take over Super Bowl and Saint Patrick's Day, which
was another one that had huge beer sales, and no
one had thought of selling alcohol on Halloween before that.
(35:32):
It was genius on the part of the Core's marketing people.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Anywhere there is an interest in American youth culture, we've
been able to export Halloween goods to them so that
they can celebrate it. It started slowly quite a while ago,
with things like Guinness, who would market Halloween carties to
(35:58):
bars that served Guinness, and they'd send out the decorations
with the extra guinness and you know, here's all. It's
kind of like what happened with Single DeMaio here. More recently,
it was like here's the Guinness, here's the stuff you
put up in the bar Let's celebrate Halloween. Wherever we
sell Guinness, it's you know, claiming the Irish holiday.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
The other thing that has spread it around the world
is retailing in things like McDonald's putting out these Halloween
themed meals all over the world, and our sitcoms come
back into play again. Everybody loves something like The Simpsons.
The Simpsons is the most successful syndicated show in history,
(36:44):
and of course The Simpsons does the Treehouse of Horror
every year. Those things were seen all over the world
and people started to get interested and they would pick
up from there and begin to celebrate Halloween. That kind
of brings us up to where we are at now,
a global celebration that really started as a strictly American
(37:06):
holiday that was descended from ancient Celtic tribes.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
And great job is always on the production by Greg
Hengler and especial thanks to Leslie Bennettyne and Lisa Morton
again their books Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween
and Halloween and American Holiday and American History, both available
on Amazon dot Com or The Usual Suspects. By the way,
ten billion dollars will be spent this year and every
(37:33):
year on Halloween here in America alone, and what a
story about this holiday? Not a big deal in colonial America.
Let's face it, the Puritans weren't exactly partiers, and they
didn't even celebrate Christmas, let alone Halloween. But after the
Civil War, our greatest calamity, well, searching for the dead
became well something of great interest, plus that Victorian sensibility.
(37:55):
And then, of course, right after World War Two, we
had TV, the suburbs, candy company, mass marketing, and well,
just another reason to have some fun. And Americans love
to make an excuse to have some fun. The story
of Halloween here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
Today we're going to bring to light the Halloween stories
that have been hiding in the dark, answering the question
why do we participate in these strange celebrations every Halloween season.
(00:31):
Here to tell the story are two of the foremost
authorities on Halloween, Leslie Vanattine and Lisa Morton. Leslie is
the author of Halloween, an American Holiday and American History.
Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat, A History
of Halloween. Here's Leslie and Lisa with the story of Halloween.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
I'm Leslie Vannatyne. I've been looking at, researching and writing
about Halloween for over thirty five years now and it's
still interesting to me. And so I guess if you
wanted to start the story of Halloween, you could go
back to Sowen, which was a time of year in
(01:14):
northwestern Europe. That's Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany. It means summer's end.
Sowen means summer's end and it was time of year
around November first where tribes would move their livestock back
to winter quarters to keep them safe, and they would
gather together. It was kind of a little bit like
(01:35):
our Thanksgiving in that people would come together, they'd play games, eat, drink,
tell stories, and because it was a big community kind
of day or festival, the dead were naturally part of it.
And there was a belief that the other world was
especially present at this time, at summer's end, because we
(01:58):
were going into the dark and dangerous season, and it's
always good to consult with the ancestors when you're going
into something dangerous.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Salin, which by the way, is spelled sam hai n.
It looks like it should be pronounced sam Hayne, but
it's not. It is Salin, was a day that they
did indeed celebrate on October thirty first. Their festivals started
when the sun went down, so it began actually on
the evening of October thirty first, and then spilled over
(02:33):
into November first, and it was a night when they
believed that the veil between the worlds was at its
thinnest and that things could cross over and cause real mischief.
On that night, they believed in really malicious fairies called
the She and a lot of people have heard of
the banshee that actually translates to a female fairy, and
(02:55):
these fairies were really nasty little things. We're not talking
Disney tinkerbe all kind of things here. We're talking things
that would come over and burn down their palaces. There's
a famous story about that. There's another story about a
hero who is sent out by the King on sw
and Eve to place a cord around the foot of
(03:15):
a corpse, which is something that no one else has
been able to do. And when he does this, the
corpse comes to life and he lets it down, and
it takes it out to get a drink. It's thirsty,
and it spits on people and kills them. This is
an absolutely terrifying story, so it definitely had a very
macabre element. Swan did and then when the Christians missionaries
(03:40):
came in and they were anxious to convert these celts
to their faith, and they had a doctrine of not
just trying to stamp out existing celebrations, but of trying
to co opt them. And Pope Gregory the Third was
one of the big people who was behind this doctrine
of trying to co op these existing celebrations and so
(04:03):
they sent the missionaries in and they moved the date
of their Saints celebration. Originally, All Saints Day was celebrated
on May thirteenth, which was an old Roman holiday associated
with the dead, but they moved it to November first,
and so it would begin on the eve before, and
(04:24):
they did that to try and co opt Soalen and
it was not entirely successful. Interestingly enough, so a few
centuries after that they added a second holiday, which is
All Souls Day, and that actually happens on November two.
All Souls Day also served the purpose of letting everyone
celebrate their deceased loved ones, not just Saints, so it
(04:47):
had kind of a dual role there, and that became
much more successful now they were starting to convert the
Celts and so forth.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And All Saints State doesn't have a lot to do
with Halloween, but it did give Halloween aime. Name for
All Saints Day is known in some countries as All Hallows.
All Hallows means Saint or holy one, and so All
Hallows Eve would be the eve before All Hallows Day
all Saints Day. So Halloween comes from All Saints Day
(05:15):
the name Halloween, but Halloween gets it's juju from All
Souls Day, and so here you have the same kind
of thing going on as what's going on with Swen
is that the Church recognizes there's a time every year
to honor the dead. There's several times, but in the
fall as winter's approaching. All Souls Day was instituted in
about the eleventh century, and people have been visiting graveyards
(05:40):
and remembering their loved ones and thinking of the dead
for the last thousand years on that day and still do.
Of course in many Catholic countries there's still visitations to
the graveyards. It's an important holiday and it's important time
to remember the dead. So that comes along from Salen
through the Church, becomes very popular throughout medieval times, so
(06:05):
doesn't have anything to do with modern Halloween. Really they're separate.
But what does is the eve of All Saints Day,
the night going into this holy set of holidays, which
is Halloween. And like Marti Gras is to Lent, Halloween
is to these really important church days. It's the time
(06:27):
to have a party. It's secular time. It's fun time.
It's gathered together, play games, eat, drink, tell stories before
you go into the serious church holidays, we're gonna spend
a lot of time indoors and praying.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
And you've been listening to Leslie Benetteyne and Lisa Morton
tell the story of Halloween. I love what they just described.
Marti Gras is to lend as Halloween is to All
Saints Day and all Souls Day. When we come back,
more of the story of Halloween, how it came to
be what it is today here on our American Stories. Folks,
(07:31):
if you love the great American stories we tell and
love America like we do, we're asking you to become
a part of the our American Stories family. If you
agree that America is a good and great country, please
make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and
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Go to our Americanstories dot com now and go to
(07:52):
the donate button and help us keep the great American
stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And we
continue with our American Stories and the story of how
(08:12):
Halloween came to be. Our two in house experts, Leslie
Bennettyne and Lisa Morton continue with the story.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So when the church theorized about purgatory, this was a
place where souls went to wait until they could either
send to heaven or not. And when purgatory became an
important concept in the church, it was critical for people
(08:43):
to pray for their dead because if the harder they prayed,
the more they prayed, the easier their loved ones would
have to go into heaven. So the church actually created
this interactive relationship between the living and the dead. It
became part of Halloween this day, so if you pray
for the dead, you can help them to heaven. There
(09:05):
was a custom of begging house to house that was
associated with All Souls Day, and in several of these processions,
people could ask house to house for soul cakes. Give me,
give me a piece of bread or a soul cake,
and I'll say a prayer for the one you have lost.
So there was this nice exchange, and it's also set
(09:28):
a kind of precedent for house to house begging that
we still see at Halloween today, only it's candies and
there's no prayers for the dearly departed.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Now we have this thing coming in called All Hollows Eve,
which eventually gets abbreviated into the name we know Halloween,
and it was for the first few centuries and we're
talking now around probably the thirteen fourteen, fifteen hundreds. It
was a day that was somewhat similar to Salen, that
was celebrated with feasting, with gatherings, with playing game. We know,
(10:00):
for example, that bobbing for apples was around really early on,
but we are also getting them keeping that more macab element.
And one of the classic descriptions we have of an
early Halloween celebration is a Robert Burns poem from seventeen
eighty five called Halloween, and it talks about telling ghost
(10:22):
stories and playing these fortune telling games. At the time,
young people were obsessed with learning who they would end
up marrying, so they would play these fortune telling games
on Halloween night that would tell them who they might
end up marrying. And the games sometimes were very macab.
They might consist of calling on the devil. Some of
(10:42):
them were more innocent. For example, they would set nuts
out in front of a fireplace and they would name
each of the nuts for a specific person, and depending
on which nut cracked first, would indicate who they would
end up marrying. And in fact, that was so popular
that in some parts of the British Isles it was
called Nutcrack Night rather than even Halloween or All Saints
(11:03):
Eve or All Hallows Eve.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Another thing that was interesting about All Souls in All
Saints was that it was Catholic, and so in Ireland,
no problem whatsoever. But when Protestantism came in Martin Luther
and in Scotland became Protestant, and in Protestantism, ghosts are
(11:29):
slights of Satan, and so in Scotland you have this
incredibly rich and scary superstition about witches, because if there
were beings out that you couldn't see at this time
of year, they were not good in Scotland. In Calvinism,
these were agents of the devil, and the agents of
(11:49):
the devil that they fixed on were witches. And so
in Calvinist Scotland you've got this incredible witchcraft.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Lord well was that stuck.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
With Halloween to today? You know, that's where we first
got the Halloween Witch. The first Halloween icon maybe is
the ghost that you know, you're the spirit of someone
in your past who's passed on. But the second is
definitely the witch, and that came from Calvinist Scotland. So
with this iconography of witchcraft in its association with Halloween,
(12:24):
it's a nighttime thing, right. Halloween is a nighttime holiday.
You have to celebrate it mostly after dark, and witchcraft
is kind of something that happens in the dark, and
so nocturnal animals and creatures get associated with it just
over time and throughout mythology and folklore. So the images
(12:46):
of the witch came down through the centuries and got
more and more associated with cats and bats and moons
and all sorts of things that you would find in
the dark. That had a lot to do with just
how people portrayed Halloween flater in magazines when there were
drawings of it, and even later than that, in the
(13:07):
nineteen thirties in America won we have this explosion of
postcards and they needed graphic images, and all of a
sudden we grew up with the witch, the moon, the cat,
the that being part of Halloween.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And there is a final thing that cements the place
of witches in Halloween, which is much more recent, which
a lot of people may not realize how important this was.
There is a nineteen thirty nine film that comes out
called The Wizard of Oz and Margaret Hamilton's portrayal of
the wicked Witch in that with the green skin and
the huge black pointed hat and the black cloak and
(13:42):
so forth, really created our image of the witch as
we have it now. Prior to that, if you look
at vintage drawings of Halloween witches, they're often in red,
and they are usually depicted as being elderly but not
quite so cronish looking, although there were also sexy young
(14:03):
witches that were popular in the nineteen tens and twenties.
And of course the black Cat and the Cauldron are
also Halloween icons that come along with the witch. And
there's also a story by Edgar Allan Poe which cements
the reputation of the black Cat in regards to Halloween.
(14:25):
So at this point people might be wondering, well, how
does that end up becoming associated with things like the pumpkin,
which is kind of now our king of Halloween icons.
The pumpkin also comes to us from Ireland. Obviously they
don't have pumpkins in Ireland. Pumpkins are a New World
fruit and they had turnips though, and the Irish loved
(14:47):
to play pranks on Halloween, and when the Irish came
to America in the mid nineteenth century. In the eighteen forties,
because of famine, they brought a lot of these halloween
things with them, and the things they brought with them
was pranks. And one of their favorite pranks was to
take these turnips that grew in Ireland and carve a
(15:08):
sort of spooky looking face into them, and then put
a candle inside of that, and they would set that
out somewhere at night on Halloween night, where an unwaried
traveler or an unwary homeowner might stumble across this thing.
And you can imagine that if you're out late at
night and you suddenly turn a corner and you see
this glowing face, it would give you a bit of
(15:29):
a start. So they brought that with them to the
New World, and of course when they arrived here and
found these gorgeous, huge pumpkins, they were the perfect thing
to replace the turnips. But there's another thing that's associated
with the pumpkin that's really interesting, which is a legendary
trickster story where we get the name Jack o Lantern
(15:52):
comes from a famous legend of Jack the Trickster, and
Jack was a blacksmith who had three times tricked the
devil out of coming to claim his soul. But when
Jack finally dies, it turns out that neither Heaven nor
Hell wants anything to do with Jack. The devil agrees
only to throw him a burning hell ember to light
(16:14):
his way. And so Jack places this ember in this
carved gourd and uses it to light his way as
he eternally roams the earth. And that's how the name
Jack o Lantern came about, being associated with these carved pumpkins.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
In colonial America, Halloween was not a thing. There were Halloween,
the secular holiday, the Eve of all Hallows, was not
anything that anyone would celebrate. We were Puritans, you know,
we didn't even celebrate Christmas. This is not going to happen.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And We've been listening to Leslie Bannettine and Lisa Morton
tell the story of Halloween, and I'm learning things that
I never knew about the Jack O'Lantern, for instance, or
the pumpkin. Great storytelling more of it to come, Leslie
Vanattine and Lisa Morton. Leslie is the author of Halloween,
an American Holiday and American History. Lisa is the author
(17:09):
of Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween, the story
of Halloween, how it came to be here in America,
such a big, big celebration day. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue here with our American stories and the
story of Halloween as brought to us by Leslie Bennettyne
and Lisa Morton, both prolific authors and experts on the
subject of all things Halloween. It's history right up to
modern day times. Here's Leslie and Lisa to continue with
the story.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
As the colonies developed, and this the new nation developed,
different colonies had different religious bents, and so in Catholic
colonies like Maryland, for example, yes there was All Saints
and All Souls state, but that's not Halloween. It's all
Hallows in name. But it's a church holiday, and it
had nothing to do with witches and ghosts and pumpkins
and anything that we would recognize. Those are church holidays.
(18:52):
The first was the Civil War, when so many people
had lost so many family members, and in that war
more than many many many other subsequent wars combined, everybody
had lost somebody and they didn't know if they were
dead or alive. There was so many missing people in
(19:14):
the Civil War, so you know, where's my husband, where's
my brother? Is he coming home?
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Where's my son?
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I can't find my son. And there was a huge
interest in the dead, in spiritualism.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
In ghosts.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
All of this became really important to post Civil War
Victorians who were bereft. So keep that in mind. We
loved ghosts at that time, and then put the nail
in the coffin. Was printing became cheap at that time.
In the late eighteen hundreds, there were a million magazines.
(19:52):
I exaggerate slightly. There were a lot of ladies, magazines
and newspapers, all of looking for content. And when they
discovered this ghostly Scottish they thought holiday that had to
do with the spirit world and looking into the future.
(20:13):
They just loved it. And so it was Victorian hostesses
who started throwing the first Halloween themed parties. So let's
get together and play games when we look into the future.
Let's decorate by bringing the outdoors inside. Let's get cornstocks
and pumpkins and all sorts of rural things, things from
(20:35):
the country that we love, and let's throw a party
on this weird night that we've heard about, this Halloween.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
So these are all the things that we have coming
over with the holiday. And you might think that maybe
trick or treat, which is I think our greatest American
addition to the holiday, stems directly from all of those things,
but it actually does not. It comes from pranking. And
(21:04):
it's a really strange history of how that comes about.
The Irish who loved to play their pranks that caught
on a lot in the nineteenth century, and American kids
loved playing pranks, of course, and this spread throughout the
entire country, and at first it was quite innocent. The
(21:25):
prank playing in America was things like the kids would
go out to a farm and they would maybe overturn
an out house or tip over a cow, or one
of their more elaborate pranks that they loved was to
disassemble a gate and move it and reassemble at someplace
like either the main street of the town or the
(21:46):
top of a barn. And in fact, this one prank
was so popular that Halloween was known as gate Night
in many areas, and.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
So tricks were really the first part of Halloween that
we had in this country. And it was like every
kid's right to go out under cover of darkness and
take the gates off of their neighbors pigpens or pile
stones up in the middle of the street, or put
molasses on the church bench, or remove the church steps,
(22:16):
or hang a rocking chair in the tree, or any
number of pranks, and everyone would say, okay, it's Halloween.
It's okay, it's just kids.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
So it was all good fun at first. But then
by the twentieth century, as America is becoming much more
urbanized and more populated, these pranks move into the cities,
and when they move into the cities, they become much
less nice. Now they are about destroying things, about shattering
glass bulbs and windows. They are about setting fires, tripping pedestrians,
(22:56):
and by the thirties they are causing millions of dollars
of damage. And this is also during the Great Depression,
when a lot of these cities don't even have the
money to pay for all of the damage that's resulting
from this vandalism, and a lot of cities at this
point considered dropping Halloween or trying to ban it. But
(23:16):
fortunately there were a few places where cooler heads prevailed
and said, you know, maybe we can buy these kids
off instead of trying to ban this holiday, because that
could backfire on us, which it would have.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
And so every civic organization you can think of, PTA's,
Kawana's Moose, Junior Chamber of Commerce, churches, hospitals, dance clubs,
anything through started to throw Halloween parties for kids to
keep them inside where they could be seen. So Halloween
(23:53):
was always an outside in the dark event, and this
was an effort to move Halloween indoors, actually to move
it more towards younger children, to help younger children celebrate it.
Let's just take a little bit of the danger out
of this holiday, keep the kids where we can see them,
and tame it down just a little bit. And there
(24:14):
was an enormous coast to coast effort to throw Halloween
parties for kids by civic work. It's actually very generous,
you know, to do this, and to some extent it worked.
I mean, there were creative ideas. Police would drive around
in their cruisers in one city and hand out candy
(24:34):
preemptively to children so that they wouldn't come throwing cabbages
at doors or ringing doorbells and just trying to tame
the whole situation down. Or radio programs sometimes would have
call in shows where if you were home at say
seven thirty or eight o'clock, and you called in, you
could win a prize that keeps the child or the
(24:55):
teenager inside where you can see them.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
And they got together, and they a actually put out
little pamphlets in many of the cities that would tell
homeowners how to do this. So these little pamphlets would
suggest that the homeowners get together. Again. We're still during
the Great Depression, a lot of homeowners don't have money
to spare for parties and so forth. But if enough
of the houses got together in one street, they could
(25:20):
put something together for the kids. And these were called
house to house parties. And the way they would work
was the first house might give the kids a very
simple costume, probably just a sheet with two holes cut
in it. The kids would get to be ghost. The
next house would give the kids maybe a little spooky entertainment,
like they'd have the basement the lights shut off, a
(25:43):
little thing where the kids would have to go through
the basement, somebody might jump out and frighten them. This
becomes kind of the very earliest version of our modern
haunted attraction. And then the next house would give the
kids a little treat. Well, this was very popular. It
caught off very quickly. Everyone started holding parties for kids.
(26:04):
By nineteen thirty six we get the first mentioned in
a national American magazine of the phrase trick or treat,
which actually probably came down from Canada. The first recorded
uses we have of it are in Canada, although they
are not always in relation to kids in an actual costume.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
And you've been listening to Lisa Morton, author of Trick
or Treat, A History of Halloween, and Leslie Pratt Benattine,
author of Halloween and American Holiday and American History. By
the way, both of those books are available on Amazon
dot com. What are the usual suspects? By all means,
pick them up, read them great holiday material, great holiday
reading material. When we come back more of Leslie and
(26:47):
Lisa on the story of Halloween, m.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
No.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
And we continue with our American stories and the story
of Halloween and how it came to be. Leslie Bennetteyne
and Lisa Morton continue with the storytelling.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Now here's the thing, like, how did the trick or
treat happen? From all of these parties, from all these
mischief and tricks, and the town fathers and mothers trying
to tamp it down. That never entirely worked. What really
worked was involving each individual homeowner. So there were kids
(28:08):
out on the street accosting people for money or food
or treats, and accosting like hitting them on the back
with a sock full of flour or you know, and
asking them for something. So the thinking was, okay, so
if this, if that's what they want, If they're out
accusting people, banging on doors demanding things, and we're in
(28:31):
our houses saying go away, go away, why not have
something for them. Be you ready, have candy, have treats,
bakes and brownies, make cookies, popcorn balls. When they come
to your door, open it up, offer it. And that,
in fact was what worked. But people had to be
(28:52):
talked to do this.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
So the whole ritual kids in a costume, going to
a house saying trick or treat, being rewarded with a
little sweet. That is in place by about nineteen thirty six,
and it takes a few more years for it to
become really widespread across the country, and then it gets
put on hold during World War Two because sugar was
rationed and it was very hard to get into the
(29:17):
spirit of Halloween and get treats and so forth. But
then at the end of the war it comes back
with a vengeance because we now also have something called
television that's coming in. And trick or treat was spread
in part through early sitcoms. You can, for example, go
look at a I think it's nineteen fifty episode of
(29:40):
the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and you can see
a really early, kind of strange looking form of trick
or treat. The kids are standing at the door in
the afternoon and their costumes are not quite finished. But
it definitely paved the way for this whole institution of
trick or treat. Also, the ca companies come in now
(30:01):
because mom sitting at home does not want to bake
all day. She doesn't want to spend her day making
popcorn balls or candied apples or donuts to give to
these kids. It's much easier to just go out and
buy a bag of pre made candies and to pass
those out.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
There was a cartoon that was incredibly popular culture contreat.
It was a Donald Duck cartoon where Hueye doing Louis Are,
you know, sending off small explosives and it kind of
taught what you're supposed to do with kids who are
pulling tricks is to offer them candy. This is what
we do. And that cartoon was shown in movie theaters
(30:42):
for for a long time and thousands and thousand thousands
of people saw it, and so we kind of started
to get the pictures. This is how you take care
of tricks, and it's fun for kids, and it's actually
fun for the homeowner who doesn't have to like, put
up with his doorbell ringing, you know, every thirty seconds
on Halloween night, or worry that if he doesn't open
(31:04):
the door to kids that they'll remove his fence posts
or steps by morning. La la la lay wound lawn.
(31:42):
So by nineteen sixty four, it was almost Unamerican not
to turn your porch light on it.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Folloween, so we now have this combination of these sitcoms
and these candy companies and costume companies also come in
and make it much easier. Again, Mom doesn't have to
sew noash. You can just go out to the store
buy a costume. The kids can buy their favorite character.
Because now the costume companies are merchandising cartoon characters, historical characters,
(32:10):
things like that and trick or treat becomes a real
institution for about the next twenty years, and then a
couple of things happen to change trick or treating. In
the early sixties, there is a woman named Helen File
who gives out. She gets tired of older kids coming
to her house on trick or Treat and she gives
them aunt buttons, and she is doing this just because
(32:34):
she doesn't like these older kids trick or treating, but
it becomes sort of trendsmogrified into the story of the
anonymous psycho who is spiking apples with razor blades, and
then in the early seventies that gets added to again
with the story of Ronald O'Brien who is a young
(32:56):
boy who is poisoned by his own father who who
is in for an insurance scheme and puts arsenic in
his children's pixie sticks. And even though it was proven
pretty quickly that this was the father doing this, it
again becomes a notion that there are anonymous psychos out
there who are tampering with your kids treats on Halloween,
(33:19):
and it really knocks trigger treating back, even though a
lot of hospitals are now stepping up and saying things like, well,
X ray your kids candy on Halloween Night. It does
set the whole idea of Halloween Night being just for
kids back pretty severely, and that kind of gets a
(33:39):
final blow in nineteen seventy eight when one movie changes
a holiday, which is something that I don't know has
happened with any other holiday. John Carpenter releases Halloween, and
now we have, for the first time a look at
Halloween as something that is absolutely terrifying and very adult.
(34:02):
And it kind of cements that transformation of the holiday
from something that is celebrated mainly by kids to something
that is much more a sort of celebration of fear
for adults. And that continues throughout the seventies with counterculture
groups claiming the holiday, and also into the eighties when
(34:24):
beer companies come along and realize that there is a
lot of money to be made off of Halloween. The
Corps Company was looking for a holiday that they could
turn into their version of the Super Bowl, and their
first attempt at marketing beer to Halloween did not work.
It was something that a few people may remember a
(34:46):
silver Bullet campaign. But then in about nineteen eighty six,
they got smart enough to hire Elvira, and as soon
as they hired Elvira and put standies of her in
markets throughout the country, Halloween became a beer holiday. It
was huge, and it was one of the things again
that morphed this from being something for kids into something
(35:08):
much more adult oriented. Beer sales were huge after they
hired Elvira. She was the magic marketing tip there and
using her and her image and so forth allowed them
to take over Super Bowl and Saint Patrick's Day, which
was another one that had huge beer sales, and no
one had thought of selling alcohol on Halloween before that.
(35:32):
It was genius on the part of the Core's marketing people.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Anywhere there is an interest in American youth culture, we've
been able to export Halloween goods to them so that
they can celebrate it. It started slowly quite a while ago,
with things like Guinness, who would market Halloween carties to
(35:58):
bars that served Guinness, and they'd send out the decorations
with the extra guinness and you know, here's all. It's
kind of like what happened with Single DeMaio here. More recently,
it was like here's the Guinness, here's the stuff you
put up in the bar Let's celebrate Halloween. Wherever we
sell Guinness, it's you know, claiming the Irish holiday.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
The other thing that has spread it around the world
is retailing in things like McDonald's putting out these Halloween
themed meals all over the world, and our sitcoms come
back into play again. Everybody loves something like The Simpsons.
The Simpsons is the most successful syndicated show in history,
(36:44):
and of course The Simpsons does the Treehouse of Horror
every year. Those things were seen all over the world
and people started to get interested and they would pick
up from there and begin to celebrate Halloween. That kind
of brings us up to where we are at now,
a global celebration that really started as a strictly American
(37:06):
holiday that was descended from ancient Celtic tribes.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
And great job is always on the production by Greg
Hengler and especial thanks to Leslie Bennettyne and Lisa Morton
again their books Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween
and Halloween and American Holiday and American History, both available
on Amazon dot Com or The Usual Suspects. By the way,
ten billion dollars will be spent this year and every
(37:33):
year on Halloween here in America alone, and what a
story about this holiday? Not a big deal in colonial America.
Let's face it, the Puritans weren't exactly partiers, and they
didn't even celebrate Christmas, let alone Halloween. But after the
Civil War, our greatest calamity, well, searching for the dead
became well something of great interest, plus that Victorian sensibility.
(37:55):
And then, of course, right after World War Two, we
had TV, the suburbs, candy company, mass marketing, and well,
just another reason to have some fun. And Americans love
to make an excuse to have some fun. The story
of Halloween here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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